Presents from a prairie childhood

Jenny Lawson, the author of The Bloggess, wrote a great blog post today called Best present ever. Worst present ever, in which she detailed, as the title suggests, the best and the worst presents she had ever received.  She asked her readers to share their stories of best and worst presents and more than 500 responded, with hilarious results.

All those stories took me back to some of the Christmases of my childhood.  My parents were pretty good at Christmas gift giving, and quite generous as well, considering we grew up being reminded on a regular basis that "money didn't grow on trees". I honestly can't remember any disappointing gifts I received from them.  Although come to think of it, I never did get that above ground swimming pool I drooled over in the Eaton's summer catalogue.

I distinctly remember one year when my brother Gord and I were teenagers.  We both received identically shaped boxes which turned out to contain Agfamatic pocket cameras.  Now that was a great present!  I loved that camera.  I'm sure I took it with me on my Treble Teens choir tour to Germany and Austria the summer I turned 16.  I still have those choir tour pictures somewhere....


Another gift that stands out just as clearly as that camera was one I received at least 8 or 10 years earlier.  I think this gift was specifically for me, but it could have been a joint gift for both Gord and me.  At any rate, it required two people to use it and we both got tremendous play value out it!

The gift was a plastic walkie talkie toy.  I wish I could find a picture of it, but when I looked online, all I could find were vintage walkie talkies from the 80s that actually looked quite realistic.  The toy that we got was not exactly realistic looking.   There were two "receivers" made of soft green plastic that would actually squish together if you squeezed them hard enough.  Included separately was a length of plastic tubing approximately 12 feet long, the ends of which you attached to each of the receivers.  Gord would go into one room with one of the receivers while I went around the corner about 12 feet away with the other, with the plastic cable suspended between us.  Gord would whisper into his receiver and, if I had my receiver clutched to my ear, I would hear the message come whispering down the tubing (not to mention a ticklish sensation in my ear). Talk about modern technology!  It was amazing.  I have no idea what secret messages we transmitted back and forth to each other but it certainly kept us entertained.

And finally, one more gift memory I have to share!  When I was a kid, my mom's side of the family, the Schmidt side, used to get together for a big family gathering a few days after Christmas.  There were five families and about 20 or so cousins of various ages.  I'm not sure if all of us cousins exchanged names for gifts, but definitely the youngest ones did, because I distinctly remember the year that my cousin, Leighton, had my name.  Leighton was the youngest cousin and was about seven years younger than me.  He was probably about 5 or so, which means I would have been 12. 

I remember him handing me my gift and him absolutely vibrating with excitement as I opened it.  And what did I find inside?  A plastic bag full of water and a gold fish!  Wow, for this little farm girl from the sticks, that was a pretty cool gift.  But the thing that made it so memorable is how excited Leighton was to give it to me!  He kept hopping up and down asking, "Do you like it?  Do you like it?"  All these years later, I still get a kick out of remembering his excitement at giving me that very special gift.


So what about you?  What kind of presents do you remember?  Good ones?  Bad ones?  Share your story in the comments below.